We implement software solutions to help us become more productive. These pieces of code allow us to do more through creating efficiencies. Bad software hinders our ability to do the work. Normally I would call this unproductive, but I had a weird thought fighting a human resources program this morning. Unproductive software is both disruptive and unproductive, so we should call it disproductive.
Not only are we not achieving as much as we ought, but we also become so frustrated with the lack of productivity that we whine and complain about how bad it is to others. There is a synergy of lost productivity due to the overwhelming frustration of having to deal with such horrible software. The amount of frustration become its own entity and source of workplace dysfunction.
Like, all I wanted was a simple report the software claims to be able to do. It tells me zero even after I try all the reported tricks to make it give me the correct value. So, I resorted to a different report that gives me all the details to add them up myself. And then I could not save the second report in Mozilla except to print it out on paper (or the HTML, but I hate that), so I had to re-do the same thing in Chrome in order to save it as a PDF. Annoying. The good thing is I discovered data entry problems I had not previously noticed due to a dropdown box defaulting to a useless value that I failed to change, which I had to fix. Everyone hates this program, which is probably why we are switching.
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